Semantic Web
Mercury News | 05/11/2002 | Dan Gillmor: Web pioneer looks at ground covered, future
Tim Berners-Lee:
“Assuming we don’t cripple technology, tomorrow’s Web will be dramatically different from today’s. What we have today is a human-readable system, a good one. The coming Web will also be machine-readable, Berners-Lee says, and the implications are enormous.
“This new Web, which Berners-Lee and others call the “Semantic Web,” will be an overlay on the current one. Its most prominent feature will be machines communicating with other machines on our behalf, using tools now under development.
“After his keynote speech, Berners-Lee was asked to describe his view of the future Internet. It will be vastly more flexible and useful than today, he said.
“Our connections will be omnipresent, he said. The context of what we’re doing virtually will move with us from one physical location to another.
“The potential seems unlimited, he said, provided we give innovators a cleanly designed, unencumbered platform on which to make their miracles. We’re in the early days, and that’s exciting to contemplate.”
The context of what we’re doing virtually will move with us from one physical location to another.
That is the line that intigues me and of course that Tim Berners-Lee said it. It is still hard to envisage – because what if the cat-door opening mechanism crashes phenomena, it might kill the cat. Sometimes it might be best done really simply! I hanker after technology that is simple. I wish Deskview had worked!
Every email is a significant act
E-Mail Notification Management
“I like to impose this extra bit of protocol on myself, to underscore that every e-mail is a significant act.”
Jon Udell is one of the few writers who takes a real interest in how our emails work, how groups work online. His column “Tangled in the treads” for Byte always has a good take on this or that aspect of online collaboration. I don’t always agree with the details (or understand the hi-tech stuff) but “that every e-mail is a significant act.” is a fine principle.
This article is about his first look at Outlook.
May the blogs be with you
Salon.com Technology | Use the blog, Luke
“The collective future of blogs lies not in dethroning the New York Times — but in becoming a force that can make sense of the Web’s infinity of links.”
The noosphere will not be built by the NYT. The shape and flow of the networks of links is not just a big wide web, there are forces in various directions – there dynamic, a struggle for outcome. Blogs are part of the benign side. A force for freedom of expression.
Living Vicariously
Forster, E. M. (Edward Morgan): The Machine Stops Literature Annotations
Another prophetic writer… hit on the idea of movies and email before WW1. Upholds the notion that we are better off not living vicariously with the aid of machines. Does he have a point? Makes me think of the Lunig cartoon of the family watching the sunset on TV while it is happening outside the window.
Maybe there is a point to it. As in: Joyce Kilmer. 18861918
119. Trees
I THINK that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day, 5
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain. 10
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.
But what if we reversed the idea:
I THINK that I shall never see a tree lovely as a poem.
In a poem the tree becomes sacred.
We spend a lot of time here in space looking at words – and somehow that seems important… to be in the noosphere. We value nature but travel to see art galleries.
We make God in our image of God.
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CMC Magazine: Technology as a Psychic Phenomenon
“Nevertheless, there are relationships, significant but covert, between the psychic and the technological. The key to this relationship lies in McLuhan’s idea of the “extensions of man.” The psychic and the technological represent two forms of the human attempt to abolish the constraints of time and space. We can, in fact, say with reason that technology represents the material expression or analogue of certain alleged psychic powers.”
In this 1997 article Grosso, in the end, dismisses the thesis. It seems to me that the trouble with techno-spiritual thesis like most religions is that it is taken all too literally. When that happens, as in this item, the essence of insight is lost. Resurrection is a potent notion – taken too literally it becomes the debate about ontology and the miracle is lost.
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“Great dreams contain inexhaustible truths, and orient us, like runes, toward our futures. One hesitates to try to explain them; one wants to dance them, act them out in living gestures. The more we put ourselves into a great dream, the more we get back. Great dreams are wells that never run dry.”
A nice quote from Michael Grosso – who has cropped up in my weblog before. The soul boost site has other nice quotes too for all its new age spiritual feel.
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“I can plug my microphone straight into my laptop, and it’s got the best recording quality there is.”
“A gorgeous thing is happening now as technology becomes more common. It’s like years ago, when there was a piano or guitar in everyone’s home and everybody would know how to use them. It’s excellent, because if one’s human spirit wants to write a song, it’s more likely to be captured now. Good music always wins.”
Björk from the current issue of Wired. Björk’s comment here is interesting… the laptop becoming a sort of comly ubiquitous thing that somehow destroyes the power of the elite.
What Would McLuhan Say?
Derrick de Kerckhove, the man who occupies the same swivel chair as mass media’s philosopher king, ruminates on how the Web is creating a newly tribalized society.
By Kevin Kelly
The Web is a new guise of language
From the same old Wired mag.
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Wired 4.10: Universal Personality
By Gerben de Graaf
“The terrestrial sphere we live on is wrapped in thousands of invisible strands of data, endlessly pouring from its surface. All of these strings of data are parts of who we are, and who we seem to be.
When you create a homepage on the Web, that page becomes part of your “universal personality,” a personality made up of all representations of you in any actual, virtual, or other worlds – and of the different ways everyone has perceived you.
Image-building is precarious. Once someone observes a virtual – or actual – part of you, it is inextricably part of you. It doesn’t matter whether this part is truly representative of your being.
For now, the only solution is to present yourself as completely as possible. Presenting your data well is presenting yourself well.
Gerben de Graaf (www.euronet.nl/users/gdegraaf) is editor of the online publication News from the Field.”
The item above is a complete “Idees Fortes” from WiReD while it still had strong ideas… this one from October 1996 The great thing is you can click through all the old issues.
“Presenting your data well is presenting yourself well.”
Interesting on the theme of identity that has run through this blog and my mind over the last few weeks. Of course my cyber explorations of ID relate to my personal life. I am getting more set in my ways, more able to stick with the lines of my character which like the wrinkles in my face wont go away but will only get deeper and mor clearly defined. What choice do have but to accept these lines – ruts even – but with grace?